Praha

10/04/2009

Like I said before, the sleeper train was not exactly what I had in mind. I guess it was probably a bit naïve of me to think that it would be somewhat like the Hogwarts Express in Harry Potter, but think about how cool it would have been if that expectation had been met! With the people getting on and off randomly in the middle of the night and the multiple ticket checks and the dogs coming through smelling for drugs coming out of Amsterdam, it just made for a mediocre nights sleep.

When we got into the train station in Prague we were worn out. I thought Prague would be a little more conducive to English, but it wasn’t not really at all. Amsterdam earned huge points in my book because it was really easy for us to communicate there. We tried to book a reservation for another sleeper train the following day to Budapest, but it turns out that that train ride would go through Slovakia and our Eurail pass doesn’t include Slovakia so we would have to buy that ticket in addition to paying for the reservation. The costs of getting to Budapest to just stay there for one night were adding up so we decided to bag Budapest and booked a reservation for a train to Vienna. That was a bit deflating but oh well. Hopefully Ill get to Budapest at a different point in my life. Then we spent about 20 minutes exchanging euro for crowns (it’s a total pain traveling to a country that is not on the euro when every where else you have been is), trying to figure out where we were and how to get to the hostel with public transportation with a gigantic language barrier, with Katherine being sick, my foot hurting, being tired from the plane ride, and being bummed out about Budapest we just decided to forget public transportation and take a taxi.

So we asked the man who did the money exchange for us where we could get a taxi and he said follow the signs. The signs he was talking about were pieces of computer paper that had the word taxi written on them and an arrow drawn on them that were posted up on the construction portion of the train station. We followed them to three men who were sitting next to Mercedes that said transport service on the sides of them. They did not have the light up taxi tops or meters in the cars either. The driver said he knew where the address of our hostel was and could get us there. I wasn’t really sure what was going on and just wanted to get to the hostel and Katherine thought something was fishy. As we pulled out of the train station Katherine asked where the meter was and how much the ride was going to be, so the man pulled out a laminate piece of paper and pointed to the top number that was going to be the fixed price for us. She said that she didn’t think that was right and we should get out but he just kind of waived us off and kept driving. 7 minutes later, we pull up to the hostel and the man demands the number of crowns he showed us (550, which equates to like 27 euro). Obviously then we realize we are being jipped. Katherine had been in a similar experience to this one in NYC and her guard was on full alert, while I was still trying to figure out what was going on. We didn’t want to give the driver all of our crowns so we ended up giving him a mixture of crowns and euro and just wanted him to give us our bags out of the trunk because visuals of him pulling a gun on us kept running through our heads. It was an upsetting situation, but hey you live you learn and apparently “taxis” in Prague are famous for that. We also figured that the guy who pointed us in the direction of the sketchy cabs was probably buddies with the taxi drivers and we totally got set up for that.

My foot is feeling a little better than it had the previous day. Im taking Tylenol and Advil pretty regularly, trying to stay off of it as much as a I can and keeping it raised. I am going to look for some sort of walking stick/cane/umbrella deal to help me move a little faster and easier on the foot. If things get worse then Ill see if Claire’s family in Torino have any suggestions on doctors, but I am seriously hoping that it will not get that bad. I do not have any intentions of letting this cut my trip short. Apparently you are also supposed to ice it, but ice is not very available over here, not even in your drinks. Ill just do my best.

So we get checked into the hostel and this hostel gives off a fantastic first impression. It is your stereotypical hostel, but in the best way possible. Warm, inviting, cheap, people hanging out everywhere, free food. The girl who checked us in was extremely friendly and helpful throughout our stay. We got a welcome beer when we checked in that we could enjoy at anytime we wanted. There was a huge jar of delicious little candies and free wifi. Another big perk for us was that we got our own room so we could sprawl our stuff out and not have to worry about it. It was still the morning when we got in and we were pretty tired, so we took a little nap once we settled into our room and then showered. The shower was interesting because you had to keep pushing a button to get water to keep coming out, similar to sinks in public restrooms, but hey it was relatively clean and warm water came out. We wanted to get something to eat relatively early so we would be hungry when it came to dinner time. We walked down the street and found a little Italian place (we normally eat Italian when looking for a quick fix because we know it will be decent) and had two tomato soups, focaccia bread, and two diet cokes all for about four euros total. Very cheap, very good deal. We went back to the hostel to get organized on our computers and have our beers before heading our for the afternoon and night.

We made reservations for a dinner cruise that we were going to do that night, while we were online. Finished our beers, then headed out with a bottle of wine we had been carrying around since we left Amsterdam. Our plan was to figure out where we were supposed to get on the dinner cruise, walk around for a bit, find somewhere to enjoy the bottle of wine, and then get on the cruise.

The only major downfall of our hostel was that it was about a 20 minute walk outside of Old Town, which is the center part of the city. When we booked the hostel, Katherine and I were still avid walkers so we didn’t think this was a huge deal. Luckily there was a bus stop right outside of the hostel that took us right into Old Town but we weren’t exactly sure where to get off. We could by bus tickets for pretty cheap right in a mini mart type place right outside of the bus stop. A very nice lady in the hostel had an extra bus ticket that she gave us and explained how public transportation works in Prague, and of course we were greatly appreciative not knowing exactly how public transportation worked in this city. We ended up getting off at a random spot so that we could get our bearings and it turned out to be the exact spot where we were supposed to get on the dinner cruise. I know how lucky. There we some nice looking stairs across a bridge that looked like a nice place to enjoy the bottle of wine so we walked over there with the intentions of posting up there for a bit. When we sat down on the stairs we realized that we didn’t have anything to open the bottle with, so we walked back across the bridge to a hotel and had the hotel bar open the bottle for us, walked backed to the stairs and had a nice time sitting on them and drinking the wine until it was time for the dinner cruise. While we were sitting on the stairs some guys (one had a redskins sweatshirt on) asked us to take a picture of them. We got to talking and had some very nice conversations. Some of them had graduated from JMU so Katherine had a lot to talk about with them. I talked to one of the guys about how differently Americans are viewed over here since Obama is our president now and not Bush and how it is really a great experience to live abroad in one place and get an actually feel for the culture. It was nice to talk to him. He also told me that the huge TV tower in Prague, the black specks on it are actually statues of infants, which I found to be weirdly fascinating.

The dinner cruise ended up being not so delicious, but that is what we figured it would be with what we paid for it. The gave us complimentary drinks (shots of some sort of cherry brandy) when we got on the boat. They had a great, cute three piece band playing, which played songs that I recognized and it was nice to have background music. We ordered a big bottle of water (because free water doesn’t exist in Europe making it very hard to stay hydrated) and two glassed of white wine. The wine was terrible, which we realized after taking one sip, so we tried to send it back, but the waitress (who wasn’t wearing a bra for some bizarre reason) kept telling us “es imposible”. Needless to say we didn’t drink the wine and still had to pay for it after going through a huge hoopla with a different waiter (that our waitress sent over because she didn’t want to deal with us). Feeling like we were being taken advantage of was being coming a common feeling in Prague. The boats bathrooms smelled like all boats bathrooms do, which I thought was a funny thing to have in common or at least not something that I would think of. We thought the dinner cruise would be great because we would be able to see a bunch of stuff, but it was dark and nobody was explaining what we were looking at, and you had to go up top to get a good look at things, and it was cold up their so Katherine was the only one that ventured up there. We went through a lock system on the while on the cruise, which was pretty cool. Im glad we did it but it was pretty anticlimactical.

We got on the 133 bus that would take us back to our hostel without buying new tickets. Trying to elude paying for public transportation tickets if it is not convenient for us to buy them has become a common theme for us. I hope it doesn’t bite us in the butt later on. Also it turns out that we could have not had to pay for any metro tickets in Munich because they are included in our Eurail pass. Oh well, now I don’t feel too bad about not paying for the last two days and if I venture back that way, I will totally take advantage of that knowledge